Over the last few days, Ted Kennedy’s death has, of course, brought up the Chappaquiddick incident.  We are told that we should view the death of Mary Jo Kopechne as a “terrible mistake” that led Teddy to change his ways.  According to Kennedy’s fans, Mary Jo’s drowning was a turning point in a grief-stricken life, and a terrible burden which the Senator would spend the rest of his life trying to work off.

As usual with the Kennedy family, the facts don’t support the claims.

At 11:15, July 17th 1969, Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne left a party together.  Teddy was driving.  Their car went off a narrow bridge, flipped over, and sank to the bottom of the bay, landing on its roof.  Ted got out, and swam to the surface.  Mary Jo did not.

After that, things get hazy as the facts about Kennedy’s subsequent actions seem to come almost solely from his own testimony.  Ted claims that he dove back down several times, but was unable to get Kopechne out of the submerged vehicle.  So, what did he do?

Did He:
A: Get to a phone and call for help?
B:  Run to the well-lit home of Pierre Malm (135 meters from the accident) to get help?
C: Call the police?
D: None of the above

Of course, it’s D.  Ted took a break, relaxing in the tall grass by the bay for an unspecified amount of time. 

After regaining his composure, he walked all the way back to the party he’d left with Mary Jo, passing four homes on the way.  Once he got to the house, he asked two of his buddies, Joseph Gargan and Paul Markham, to return to the accident with him, where they could help him dive some more. 

They agreed, though both later claimed that they’d insisted the whole time that Kennedy should report the accident to the authorities.  Ted refused, and the three of them went into the water in an effort save Kopechne.  When that failed, an exhausted Ted Kennedy decided to swim across the 500 meter channel and return to his Edgartown hotel.  Still not interested in reporting the accident, he went to sleep. 

According to Kennedy’s testimony “I almost tossed and turned and walked around that room … I had not given up hope all night long that, by some miracle, Mary Jo would have escaped from the car.”

That’s right, he almost tossed and turned. 

Or, was it the noisy shenanigans next door?  You see, at 2:55 that morning, he called the front desk and complained that rowdy party-goers were keeping him up.

At 7:30 the next morning, he still had not called police, and was talking to a fellow guest about the exciting finish to a sailboat race the previous day.

At 8:00 am, Gargan and Markham showed up at the inn, and the trio got into an argument.  Kennedy testified that his friends wanted to know why he hadn’t called the cops.   He said he was thinking “about my own thoughts and feelings as I swam across that channel … that somehow when they arrived in the morning that they were going to say that Mary Jo was still alive.”

No such news came, and the three men boarded the ferry back to Chappaquiddick Island, where Kennedy found a pay phone and began calling other friends for advice.  He never alerted the police.

Earlier that morning however, the car and Mary Jo Kopechne’s body were found by a pair of fishermen.  A police diver, John Farrar, was sent down to the wreck to remove the body.  At the inquest he testified that he found Mary Jo’s body crumpled up in one corner of the vehicle, where an air pocket had formed. 

He believed that she had “lived for at least two hours down there.”  His assertion was reiterated by Mary Jo’s mortician, who said the woman had died of asphyxiation, not drowning.

Kennedy plead guilty to a single charge of “leaving the scene of an accident” and was sentenced to a two-month incarceration.   The sentence was suspended due what the prosecutor called Kennedy’s “character and prior reputation.”

That was that.  Kennedy went on to become the third longest-serving Senator in US history, and claimed that the tragedy of Kopechne’s death inspired him to work tirelessly to redeem himself.

Ed Klein, a close Kennedy friend, and former editor of Newsweek and the New York Times Magazine painted a different picture in a recent NPR interview.

So, next time someone tells you what a wonderful man he was, how full of compassion, remorse, and spirit he was, remind them of this.  Remind them of Mary Jo Kopechne, down there in the dark, desperately clinging to life, while Kennedy was back at the hotel complaining about how he couldn’t sleep.

Remind them that, for the rest of his life, it was something he liked to joke about.

- Robert Laurie